Down the Great Unknown (23 page)

Back on the river and only another mile downstream, they began to repent of their crime. “Such a gang of sick men I never saw before or since,” Sumner wrote. “Whew! It seems I can feel it yet. . . . [Hall] ripped out an oath or two, and swore he had coughed up a potato vine a foot long, with a potato on it as big as a goose egg.” Sumner noted, deadpan, that “Hall was somewhat given to exaggeration, and he might have stretched the matter a bit.” Powell was in as rough shape as the others. The men pulled to shore, he wrote, “and we tumble around under the trees, groaning with pain, and I feel a little alarmed, lest our poisoning be severe.”
*

By evening they had begun to feel better. Sumner remarked that, all things considered, he “didn't think potato tops made a good greens for the sixth day of July.” Bradley, as pleased with himself as a hale man on an ocean liner full of seasick passengers, noted smugly that he expected “we shan't eat any more potato-tops this season.”

They set out the next morning at seven o'clock. Almost without noticing it, they had entered another canyon. The water was quiet, “with no more current than a canal,” and the river cut great sweeping curves as it swung back and forth between stone walls. The open valley and the “splendid meadow” that Bradley had delighted in only days before now seemed a remote memory. The cliffs grew steadily taller. By ten o'clock, when the men stopped to take measurements, the clifftop towered 1,050 feet above the river.

Side canyons were rare here and the walls almost continuous. The expedition was truly cut off now, as if traveling through a meandering stone maze. The cliffs were perpendicular in some places, eroded into great sloping terraces in others. Powell dubbed one especially striking formation Sumner's Amphitheater.

At one point, Bradley went off on his own while the others took measurements. “I . . . put my name on a flat stone with name of expedition and date and fastened it up very strong,” he wrote. “Think it will stand many years. It is the first time I have left my name in this country for we have been in a part where white men may have been before but we are now below their line of travel.”

The nine remaining men of the Colorado River Exploring Expedition were well and truly on their own.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

TRAPPED

 

The next day, July 8, brought scene after scene of discouraging bleakness. The river grew rougher, and the canyon was a study in grays and browns. Erosion had done its work, yielding great piles of broken rocks and strangely carved crags and towers. “The walls are almost without vegetation,” Powell noted with dismay. “A few dwarf bushes are seen here and there, clinging to the rocks, and cedars grow from the crevices—not like the cedars of a land refreshed with rains, great cones bedecked with spray, but ugly clumps, like war clubs, beset with spines. We are minded to call this the Cañon of Desolation.”

Powell and Bradley set out, as usual without ropes or other safety gear, to climb the cliffs to measure their height. The routine outing, on the morning of July 8, turned into one of the strangest episodes of the entire journey. “We start up a gulch,” Powell wrote, “then pass to the left, on a bench, along the wall; then up again, over broken rocks; then we reach more benches, along which we walk, until we find more broken rocks and crevices, by which we climb, still up, until we have ascended six or eight hundred feet; then we are met by a sheer precipice.”

Stymied for a moment, the two men soon found a route they could try. They made their arduous way upward, Powell in the lead. Making matters more complicated, they were carrying a barometer to measure the elevation when they finally got to the top. On the hardest parts of the climb, this made for a laborious kind of baton passing—while Bradley held the barometer, Powell inched his way upward a foot or two and then waited as Bradley passed the barometer up. Once Bradley had climbed over him, Powell would return the barometer to Bradley and scramble on a step or two farther, and so on.

With excruciating slowness, they made it nearly to the top. “Here, by making a spring,” Powell went on, “I gain a foothold in a little crevice, and grasp an angle of the rock overhead. I find I can get up no farther, and cannot step back, for I dare not let go with my hand, and cannot reach foot-hold below without.” This easy-to-overlook reference to “my hand” (an ordinary climber would have said “my left hand”) was one of the few times Powell reminded his readers that he was not only taking on a mighty river and thousand-foot cliffs but doing it one-handed.

Picture his predicament—Powell was clinging to a rock face hundreds of feet above a river, keeping his balance only by grasping a protrusion in the rock. He could not see a nearby ledge that he could climb to, and, unlike any other trapped climber, he could not even probe the rock face for a new hold with one hand while holding on with the other.

Powell called to Bradley for help. After a moment, Bradley found a route that let him scramble to a ledge above Powell, but he could not reach him. Bradley looked for a stick that he could extend to Powell or a tree he could break a branch from. Nothing. He considered lowering the barometer case, but Powell didn't think he could hold on to it.

They needed a plan, and fast. “Standing on my toes,” Powell wrote, “my muscles begin to tremble.” Rock climbers call this involuntary spasming “sewing machine leg.” It throws off a climber's balance and saps his strength, and it can spread to other overburdened muscles. “It is sixty or eighty feet to the foot of the precipice,” Powell went on. “If I lose my hold I shall fall to the bottom, and then perhaps roll over the bench, and tumble still farther down the cliff.”

Bradley devised a desperate scheme. He was dressed in only a shirt and long underwear. Stripping off his drawers, he lowered them toward Powell. They hung straight down from the ledge Bradley stood on, dangling in the air above Powell's head.

And, because Bradley's ledge overhung Powell's, the makeshift rescue line was behind the Major. Now came the key moment. To grab the drawers, Powell would have to release his handhold, lean back into space, and find the tattered underwear before he fell, empty-handed, to his death.

He let go, groped for the lifeline, grabbed it, and then hung on one-handed. Bradley struggled to haul Powell upward, like a fisherman who had hooked a monster (except that this fish prayed mightily for the line to hold). Each man concentrated all his efforts on his own grim test of strength: Powell clutched the underwear in his left hand, desperate not to lose his grip; Bradley, at 150 pounds not much bigger than Powell, at 120, strained every muscle to reel him in. Powell maintained his hold, and Bradley pulled him to safety.

The story is a true cliffhanger, and it sounds more like a scene from a dime novel or a
Perils of Pauline
film than like real life. Indeed, Powell's first detailed account of his river trip—published in
Scribner's Monthly
, one of the most popular magazines of the day—ran with a series of dramatic illustrations. “The Rescue” showed Bradley lifting Powell to safety. (Though Powell barely mentioned his amputated arm, the artist had no such qualms. He also took the liberty of conjuring up a pair of pants for Bradley to cover his nakedness.)

Powell described the adventure not only in
Scribner's
but again in his
Exploration of the Colorado
. Unaccountably, he set the story at Steamboat Rock, a hundred miles upstream and not in Desolation Canyon at all. But we know it happened, for Bradley recorded it in his diary on July 8, in the all-in-a-day's-work tone that was de rigueur whenever any of the men found himself describing his own accomplishments. “
Climbed the mountain
this morning,” Bradley wrote, “found it a very hard one to ascend but we succeeded at last. In one place Major having but one arm couldn't get up so I took off my drawers and they made an excellent substitute for rope and with that assistance he got up safe.”

With Powell safe at last, he and Bradley resumed their climb to the top as if everything had proceeded according to plan. The view from the summit can hardly have helped settle their shaky nerves. From a thousand feet above the river, the outlook was “wild and desolate,” with sharp, jagged peaks in all directions. Bradley judged they were about halfway through the canyon “but not the worst half,” for the rapids had grown more threatening throughout the day. Bradley ranked one of them, yet again, as “the worst we ever run.”

Even so, Bradley was eager to carry on. It would be too much to say that he had come to welcome rapids, but there was no denying that running a rapid woke a man up. “It is a wild exciting game,” Bradley declared, “and aside from the danger of losing our provisions and having to walk out to civilization I should like to run them all for the danger to life is only trifling.”

Bradley's exhilarated tone was more significant than the words themselves. Powell's men knew by now that nearly everything was against them—they had no life jackets and the wrong boats and not enough food and too little experience.
And
they were trying to do what no one had ever done. The one thing they had going for them was courage. These were men who genuinely saw the prospect of being flung overboard into a wild river as a splendid “game.” The question was how far their courage could take them.

No one could find lining or portaging rapids exhilarating. But it was up to Powell, not Bradley, to decide whether they would run a rapid or struggle around it instead, and Bradley's taste for “wild excitement” played no role in Powell's decision-making. Late that afternoon, Powell made his usual call, and the men camped at the head of another “unrunnable” rapid. Before knocking off for the day, the crew managed to line the
Emma Dean
and one of the freight boats past the white water and carried about half the supplies on a path along the shore. They left the rest for the following morning. “I should run it if left to myself . . . ,” Bradley wrote. “Major's way is safe but I as a lazy man look more to the ease of the thing.” Bradley had hated the army, but, for now at least, he obeyed orders like a good soldier.

It would be hard to find men less lazy than Bradley and the others. Their eagerness to challenge the river reflected impatience and growing confidence, not sloth. The men were still raw, but by now they had seen scores of rapids and had begun to break the code. They had figured out early on to look for a V-shaped tongue of smooth water and follow it downstream, and now they had detected other patterns. Solitary bits of commotion in the river—an isolated patch of churning, splashing water, say—usually meant trouble. Regular features—a line of five waves, for example—were marginally less risky.

They had learned something, too, of the ways of water and rock. Pourovers, for example, form where the water flows over a barely submerged rock. From upstream, the boatman sees a smooth line of water. An untutored eye might see an invitation, a bit of order amid the whitecapped anarchy. In fact, pourovers can form “holes,” and holes can be deadly. Water passing over a rock or a boulder is suddenly confined to a smaller “channel,” so it speeds up. As it plummets off the boulder's far edge, gravity speeds it further. Smacking into the river, this mini-waterfall then dives downward, creating a “hole” where it hits, and often, on the hole's downstream side, a breaking wave that can reach fifteen or twenty feet. The true trouble begins as the river rushes to fill the hole. The result is a kind of perpetual motion nightmare, as a steady stream of falling water continues to re-dig the hole and the river labors just as insistently to fill it back up. A boat or a swimmer trapped
in a hole can be recirculated endlessly, held in a remorseless, watery fist.

First, the trapped swimmer is driven beneath the river's surface by the water crashing onto him as it cascades over the boulder. Then his natural buoyancy and his life jacket spit him up to the surface, where he will try desperately to take in a gulp of air while he has a chance. A lucky swimmer may break free, but if the hole is deep and powerful, he will likely be caught in the backwash of water moving
upstream
to fill in the hole. Then, like a prisoner strapped to an underwater Ferris wheel, he will find himself carried back to the starting point and driven under the surface a second time by the water pounding down from the rock above. The cycle repeats endlessly, while the swimmer grows weaker and more frantic.

For the same reason, fishermen standing near the base of dams sometimes drown. A man-made dam is perfectly smooth and regular, so the water flowing over it can form a hole with no “weak points” where a swimmer can pop free. It is a particularly cruel death because the instinctive and desperate urge to stay on the surface and breathe is precisely what allows the hole to retain its grip. A swimmer trapped in a bad hole may be unable to break away while wearing his buoyant life jacket. If he could somehow make the jacket vanish for a split second, he might be able to sink deep beneath the surface and escape from the hole, but the last thing he would want is to have to swim the rest of the rapid without a jacket to keep him afloat.

A boulder standing high out of the water creates trouble of a different sort. Here the water that hits the sides of the rock flows around it while the water that smacks head-on into the rock's midsection “pillows” up for a moment before finding its path around the sides. The problem is that the “pillow” extends considerably farther upstream than a beginner might guess, and the pillow behaves like an extension of the rock. A boat that nestles up against
this
pillow can find itself broadside to the current, the boat's downstream side up out of the water and its upstream side held under the river's surface by the onrushing current. The river will happily leap aboard that upstream edge, like a malicious giant jumping on a child's seesaw, and a boat can flip in an instant.